huh...reading these stories got me thinking about how many times i've been electocuted. a 350 volt capacitor REALLY hurts. ever put your forearm across an exposed phone block? hurt for a good while after that. how about an old alarm system com line, those will DROP you. i've been hit with household current so many times it doesn't even phase me anymore. i wonder if that has anything to do with my short term memory problems? here's my good moment of stupidity recently though. i was setting timing on the new engine and had to move the distributor a tooth. well that involved pulling the plug wires off the one side to take the cap off. after doing all that and putting the cap back on, some genius didn't reconnect the plug wires fire it up and it's running really rough (surprise) i figure it's just timing and lean over to turn the distributor, which involves putting my arm on the engine. did i mention that this is a 50,000 volt HEI with performance module. ZAP! what the hell?? so i lean in and try again...POW. now i'm a little pissed and then i see all 4 plug wires sitting on the intake manifold and using me as the ground. that was fun...
my (old enough to be my grandpa) uncle told me of wiring the old coil to the car body gag. I need to go visit that ol' fart 'fore he cruises off. last time I was there he had several of those old wood bodied coils sittin around. JML
Long before there was Johnny Knoxville and the Jackass gang.........there were pioneers like this man. Never forget.
There was a not so bright kid in hs auto shop who had his car in all the time. He was working on it and kept going back in to turn the ignition off, we convinced him to just grab the coil wire and pull it off to save him all that walking. Same kid was putting spark plug wires on and we told him just to pull all of his old wires off at once and put the new ones on, needless to say he didn't drive that car home that day. I worked at a body shop and we used to run a wire from the horn to the hot side of various other things on the car including the headlights, turn signals and brake lights. One day the guy would go to leave and the minute he tapped his brakes his horn honked and he would slam on his brakes terrified. Another time he woudl drive home and wouldn't need his lights until morning, then his horn would blast in the driveway at 6:00 in the morning. The turn signal was fun too
My Dad told me about wiring up cars to touch the bumpers together, like model A or T's. He told me they use to short out engines by grounding the plugs with their hands! Ouch. I guess they didnt have much to do in the hills but get drunk and do stupid shit haha He also said he would charge up a condenser on a battery and lay it on the counter. He had a gas station and kids would always be in there buying pop and just goofing off. So he put a couple old condensers out some charged off a 9v battery. He said they would throw them down and he would say whats wrong? They didnt understand why it shocked them. He would pick it up and say doesnt shock me hmmmm
In '86, I worked at a body shop sweeping the floors (first job). One of the guys took some speaker wire and ran it from the coil of one car and set it on the seat. told the kid (me) to go move the car. I hit the ignition once and got zapped in the ass, and knew something was up. They sent another guy out there, and he actaully got the the car started--with the door closed. Sucker climbed out the window like it was a Winston Cup car and his ass was on fire! Ran around the parking lot grabbing his ass and everything. My dad always played with electricity when he was a kid in the '50. (less than 12 years old) Built his own HAM radio, had a telegraph set up between his house an his best friend a few doors down, etc. He built a Tesla coil and a Jacob's Ladder out of a Ford T-coil; there were plans in Popular Mechanics and Popular Electronics and stuff. Eventually, he upped the power supply with parts from a big neon sign he scavanged. He hot rodded the power supply, and had all kinds of fun. He'd ramp it up and get the thing to stand a 6-inch spark up in the air, grab the spark, and then walk around holding a flourescent light bulb--which was lit and stayed charged for a while. Scared the hell out of his mom. Then he found a bunch of square panes of glass from his dad's road construction garage--the squares that are in the metal angle-iron warehouse window frames. He build a wood rack that held them stacked up horizontally, spaced a little bit apart. Sprayed one side with paint and slapped a sheet of tin foil over it, then set it in the rack. He'd hook the wire from his little super coil to it, and watch the sparks climb the edges of the tin foil, all the way up the rack. They'd get to the top pane of glass/tin foil, collect in the center of the square, and then blow a hole all the way through the centers of all the glass panes. He said he spent hours in the basement blowing apart glass. When he was in college, his electrical engineering professor did a demonstation very similar to Dad's coil, and blew through a piece of glass. That's when dad found out it takes THOUSANDS of volts to blow through glass. He got sick and had to leave. The professor refused to believe a 12 year old kid built a coil in his basement that would blow through glass. And now we can't pry our kids away from the X-box. -Brad
My grandfather told me he would wire it up to the seat springs on someone elses car and then stand back and watch for the owner to come and give himself a large charge. then laugh all the way home.
My Dad was teaching me how to do a tune up and he handed me a spark plug wire and told me to hold it. Before I could form the question of why I had to hold a spark plug wire he bumped the starter. I of course jumped back and started shaking my hand trying to get the feel back in it. I asked him why he did that and with a straight face told me that he wanted to show me why I should never grab a spark plug wire while the car was running.
When I was an apprentice in the early 80's the game was to get the other 'not so bright' apprentice to wash the workshop floors on a Saturday morning. Whilst he was standing in a pool of water I used to throw him a fully charged capacitor which he would catch. Funny the first time but absolutely fucking hilarious after we had got him to do it 3 or 4 times. If ever there was a candidate to prove Darwin correct it was that boy.... P.
Once we were trying to shock this ol guy and since we didn't know nuthin about lectricity or nuthin his heart stopped and he died. It was real dang funny.
I had a great uncle who just died this past summer at 93 years old. When he was a kid growing up on a farm in SD, they had a goat that kept chewing on the fabric top of the family car. His dad wired up the coil so, when the goat stepped up on the running board, he got a shock. The goat never went near the car again.
My dad also told me he'd rewire his buddies cars for their weddings--I guess it was a simple jumper wire from the turn signal fuse to the horn fuse. Turn signal goes on, horn honks in time with it. One of his friends got mad, popped the hood and ripped the wires off his horn. I'm writing a little notebook of advice for my kid, and the title of it is "Never Pee on an Electric Fence." When I told my parents about it, my mom said "well, would anything actually happen?" and without missing a beat, my dad looked up from his dinner and very calmly, firmly and knowingly said "Oh Yes." Those two words, delivered in that tone, said more than almost anything else I've ever heard. I laughed like an idiot for half an hour. And still do every time I think about it! -Brad
Brad, Dads have great stories, don't they!? Mine told one about a girl who jilted a buddy of my dad's because the "new" boyfriend had a heater in his Model A (early 1950's). Well, my dad's buddy got a mess of Limburger cheese and filled the guy's heater with it- said they drove by with their heads hangin' out the window after the game. Have a great Thanksgiving guys!
My dad used to tell me that he had a setup like that on his old roadster, He also told a story about when they had a demo for a new electrified fence at the fair and he got about 5 more kids to hold hands when he grabbed ahold of the wire, I guess the last kid in line got knocked on his ass.
The Jalopy Journal
